1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a radio paging receiver with a display unit having a function of displaying a received message on a screen.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In recent years, innovative technical developments have been remarkably made for radio paging receivers. In place of a tone-only type radio paging receiver having only a function of notifying a user of being paged by sounds a radio paging receiver with a display unit having a function of displaying a message on a screen has been popularly used.
In a prior art radio paging receiver of this type with a display unit, characters and numbers in a received message are displayed on the display unit in a predetermined size. When a message cannot be displayed on one screen because the size of the message is large, the screen is switched by a user, the message is continuously displayed on a plurality of screens.
FIG. 1 is a view showing a liquid crystal display section 171 in an example of the prior art radio paging receiver having a message display function.
As shown in FIG. 1, the liquid crystal display section 171 has a message display portion 172 for displaying a message, and the message display portion 172 is divided into a plurality of unit regions 173 each having a predetermined size (dot count). Each of the unit regions 173 is a region in which a unit display component such as one character or one number is displayed.
When a conventional radio paging receiver having the above liquid crystal display section 171 receives a self-paging signal containing a message, each unit display component such as one character or one number is displayed on a corresponding one of the unit regions 173. When the message cannot be displayed on one screen because the number of characters in the message is large, a screen switching operation is performed by a user, and the message is continuously displayed on a plurality of screens.
As described above, in the conventional radio paging receiver having the display unit, the message display portion for displaying a message is divided into unit regions each having a predetermined dot count, and each unit display component is displayed on a corresponding one of the unit regions. For this reason, the following problem is posed.
That is, when the message display portion is divided into a large number of unit regions, the number of characters which can be displayed on one screen is increased. For this reason, when a long message is to be displayed, the number of screen switching operations is decreased. However, since the dot count in each unit region is decreased, even when a short message is to be displayed, characters and the like are displayed in a small size, and the displayed message cannot be easily read.
When a message display portion is divided into a small number of regions, the dot count in each unit display element is increased, and the displayed message can be easily read. However, when a long message is received, a screen switching operation must be disadvantageously performed many times.